10.31.2003
(Friday)
Welcome to the grand opening of
the BunnyBass Musical Instrument Archive! We are very happy to
begin work on what we think will eventually be something very
special. To create a large, expansive photo-archive of basses,
guitars, and related musical instruments is an idea we've been
wanting to do for several years. But it was only about a year
ago that we seriously put the idea down in writing and began
searching for people who would really be willing to help with
the work and resources necessary to create a permanent website
home. After a lot of planning, re-planning, a ton of letter writing,
programming, and a good measure of good luck, here it finally
is. Whether bbMIA survives the first few months has everything
to do with whether or not enough people support us by signing
up for membership. So if you're reading this, we sincerely thank
you for your support. Things will probably be shaky at first,
but we promise to give this our best effort and hope you stay
with us to watch the development of this dream. We're hopeful
that things will go well (*fingers crossed*).
And please don't forget to tell
your friends - for less than the cost of a disposable magazine
you'll be helping to support something that will hopefully become
a lasting and deep informational resource, a mega-document of
many thousands of instruments able to function as something like
a virtual library. We're creating this archive for musicians,
collectors, luthiers, or anyone else who appreciates the beauty
and art of these wonderful tools of the mind and soul. And we're
trying to do this the difficult way - without distracting, blinking
advertisements in every margin, occupying every available square
inch of your computer screen. We're aware that this goes against
the current trend - even our oldest and most venerable museum
institutions have crossed the line into creating exhibitions
or even building collections at the behest of the most "generous
corporate sponsors" (museum slang for "highest bidders").
In a perfect world, museums, public radio, public television,
and other kinds of educational organizations would be able to
present information according to what they consider to be most
important, relevant, or interesting. But of course in reality
the amount of influence business interests hold is tremendous.
The same is true for magazines, newspapers, and websites, and
so we've decided to try to run bbMIA entirely on subscriptions
and donations. bbMIA will be a lot more useful (and fun) if we're
free to say or include whatever we like, without having worry
about offending some/any/everyone. If this proves to be impossible,
then, okay - better get an eyeful now because bbMIA may be gone
very soon! Again, we are very curious to see how things will
go.
Okay, enough ominous scary-talk
and back to the collection. Although we'll eventually have roughly
equal parts new guitars and basses featured every month, we thought
that for our first month it would be appropriate to start things
off by acknowledging our first love, our roots: the electric
bass guitar. We are, after all, an outgrowth of BunnyBASS, so
we will start things off by having basses outnumbering guitars,
12 to 6. But we know that we have been neglecting guitars for
many years, so in the future we will try to steadily grow our
guitar archive - many of us play and enjoy both kinds, and we
hear there are quite a few interesting guitars out there in the
world too. We will see if this is really true or not (just kidding).
For now, please explore the site,
and we hope you enjoy your visits. We will be pouring all our
energy into developing this site, and we hope you enjoy what
will become of this ongoing experiment called bbMIA.
~ the bbMIA staff: harry, kim,
jana, mimi, henner, nancy, leslie, jon & carol.